In customer onboarding, we need to capture and keep the attention of our SaaS users. This week we’re going to look at one of the psychological principles behind gamification. Some may think that gamifying is just a silly gimmick.

I disagree. And so do others I asked in the industry…

Gamification taps into psychological motivators that we are wired to find engaging and rewarding. Hands up if you track runs on Strava? Are you a Wordle addict? Do you have a Duolingo streak?

Let’s look at the idea of Operant Conditioning and a 5-step project to turn your onboarding process into an addictive quest.

I’ll get started…

🧠 The Theory: Operant Conditioning

This theory of learning focuses on how behaviours are influenced by consequences. Positive consequences increase repeat behaviour. Negative consequences decrease it.

You’ve experienced this many times as a child! 😂

Reinforcers are consequences that increase the likelihood of a behaviour recurring. Positive reinforcers involve adding something pleasant, like dessert for eating all of your dinner. Negative reinforcers involve removing something unpleasant, like no chores because your room has been clean all week.

There is more to operant conditioning around negative consequences but I’m not focusing on that for this project. If you want to know more about that, you can read about Operant Conditioning here.

Let me pull you out of those childhood memories and give you an operant conditioning software related example.

👀 The Example: Duolingo

Duolingo is a popular language learning app and I use it daily. Why? Because I’m strangely addicted to keeping my streak. Every time I complete a lesson or practice session, Duolingo rewards me with points, badges, and gems. Not to mention kudos from my friends on the leaderboard. These are positive reinforcers in action.

They tap into the innate human desire for achievement and recognition. This encourages us to continue using the app. On the flip side, if you let your daily practice streak lapse, Duolingo will reset your progress and that epic streak will be lost! It acts as a mild negative consequence that discourages skipping lessons.

By consistently rewarding desirable behaviours and subtly discouraging undesirable ones, Duolingo leverages operant conditioning to create a highly addictive learning experience.

🧪 The Project: Build a Quest

The aim is to gamify an aspect of your onboarding process in order to create positive consequences. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Find the Struggle

Identify a key feature, action, or functionality that users often struggle with during onboarding of your software. Is there a task that users always forget to do? Is there a feature that users get stuck on? Choose a simple one to start with and then repeat the exercise with more complex challenges when you have a working process for your quests.

Step 2: Create the Adventure

Break down the process of learning and completing the action for the customer. I talk about it often, but think through your ideal customer journey and focus on those key areas. You want to encourage the ideal behaviour with positive consequences. Once you have this structure, create a series of sequential tasks or "quests” to be completed.

Example:

Step 3: Choose your Rewards

Brainstorm and choose your rewards. Make them relevant to your company and your software. You can be creative here. Think carefully about what will speak to your user personas. The point is to engage the users and to keep that engagement throughout onboarding and beyond. Consider what these rewards lead to for the user. Do a certain number of “gems” result in a bigger reward? Do they open up other features?

Reward ideas:

Duolingo does this very well:

Step 4: Highlight the Wins

Implement a progress tracking system. This provides users with a visual representation of their advancement through the quests. You can build this into your product or you can utilise other tools that involve no code to implement. Your company may already be using software for another department, ask around about the features.

Progress tracking ideas:

Step 5: Social Recognition

People naturally have a competitive nature and desire for social recognition. This is the bonus reward that delights users even further. Display top achievers on a leaderboard. Create notifications when a user is overtaken. Duolingo do this very well and have given me a weekly nemesis or two!

Each week, I battle it out with people I’ve never met. 🤓

It’s also fair to say that everyone wants to look good in front of their boss. So allow users to share their progress and achievements on social media sites like LinkedIn.

Manual recognition:

In-product recognition:

🤓 The Analysis: Level Up

B2B SaaS tools usually aren’t games. But gamifying the experience can lead to increased adoption and excitement from users. Utilise the operant conditioning principles to guide users for the optimal experience all while rewarding them for their achievements. In the same way that Duolingo has me coming back each day to keep my streak, you can keep your users coming back for more.

If you created your Braintrust with the Onboarding and Product Teams from last week’s project then this can be something to discuss in your next meeting.

What should you expect from implementing this project?

• Free marketing on LinkedIn

• Satisfaction & adoption increase

• Talking points for check ins and QBRs

• User engagement goes through the roof

Duolingo ruined my life.

See you next Thursday.

👀 Find me on LinkedIn here.

I’d love to know your thoughts on the newsletter. Send me any questions, suggestions, or outcomes from your own experiments.